When two distant acquaintances got together to form a wedding band, it didn’t take long for their ambitions to extend beyond doing faithful renditions of wedding songs and into a project of their own. Now Leroy Brown and Mark Bruce, the dynamic duo behind The Advocators are bringing forth a debut album titled ‘Songs From An Endless Night’. Dasha Koryagina quizzed them about its creation.

Growing up in Maungaturoto and Kaiwaka, two small towns in the Kaipara District, Leroy Brown and Mark Bruce were acquainted as teenagers.

“We went to the same high school, knew each other vaguely, and then drifted, went our separate ways,” explains Mark. “Then, about five years ago, I heard that Leroy was recruiting for a wedding band. We started mucking around together with a few ideas, and quickly realised that we were terrible at being faithful to a cover version of a song. Like, the Top 40 bangers, we could do them, but we’d always twist them in our own way – in a way that was probably displeasing to wedding goers,” he laughs.

“Our egos couldn’t take it either, to be honest,” jokes Leroy. “We also realised that we had deeper ambitions. We wanted to do more – the fun was in creating songs. So very quickly, the wedding band collapsed, and we started writing songs together.”

The band’s name, The Advocators, eventuated as a result of band practice antics, and is a nod to Blind Willie Johnson’s iconic gospel song John The Revelator.

“We enjoyed randomly quoting that song during practice. We’d just throw out the lines to each other, and ‘the great advocator’ was one of our favourites,” Mark explains.

With Leroy on guitar, banjo, and lead vocals, and Mark on guitar, melodica and BVs, the album weaves together elements of country, gospel, and indie rock, resulting in a bluegrass-styled offering that has an Americana twang encompassed in an oceanic, Kiwi vibe.

Talking about their fusion, alt-country sound, the guys note that it came about as a natural combination of their different influences. Mark grew up listening to rock, whereas Leroy was more unusually raised listening to folk, Cajun music and gospel.

“[Leroy’s] got the whole ‘small town in the southern United States’ thing going on,” laughs Mark. “I was listening to more modern stuff, the classic guys like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen were my primary influences, and I circled back to roots music a lot later, whereas Leroy probably went the other way. So, our styles are an amalgamation of those different influences.”

Like the sound, The Advocators’ songwriting process is in equal parts.

“I’d write a song to be mostly lyrical, a very basic melody, and then bring it to Mark, and we would flesh it out together,” Leroy explains. “Mark would add lines and edit lyrics, and add a lot of the hooks. There’d often be a kind of basic, very bare-bones song, and being together, we would collaborate and flesh it out. Same approach with the songs that Mark had written as well.”

‘Songs From An Endless Night’ was recorded at a turbulent time for both, hence the brooding title.

“There was a period in our lives that felt like an endless night, so a lot of the songs had a dark theme to them, and we thought that the ‘endless night’ thing sort of encapsulated the feel of the songs and the feel of the album,” Mark explains.

“Initially, I wanted to call it ‘Songs To End The World To’, which is obviously a lot darker,” comments Leroy, adding that Mark’s disapproval meant they had to come up with something else.

The album was recorded in Tomarata, in a rural shed studio belonging to William Jackson (aka Jackson Hobbs), who a decade ago was half of The Stomps, with Leroy’s cousin Elliot Brown. Leroy knew him as a kid.

“We used to have New Year’s Eve parties where all the families would get together at a stage and a big bonfire and play music till the wee hours, and that was what we did when we were kids every year,” says Leroy of his connection to Jackson. “We reached out to him, said that we were keen to record an album, and to see if he was keen to produce and record it for us.”

Jackson not only agreed, he also played bass and drums on the record, and enlisted Anita Clark (Motte) to add violin and vocals, enriching the record with a sound that would certainly not have been the same otherwise.

“I knew of Jackson’s work with Elliot in terms of their kind of jungle sound. There’s some songs like Elijah that require that kind of jungle beat, so we already had that sound in our mind and knew that that was something he was going to do. But he also provided some of the bass lines. There’s a song Promised Times on there, the bass line in that was something we hadn’t envisioned that he brought to that. That’s realistically the hook in the song now, you look at it as to ‘Why wasn’t that there earlier?'” Leroy smiles.

Multi-instrumentalist and violin maestro Anita Clark was another huge bonus for their debut album.

“Anita is so versatile as a player, she goes from these real bluegrass, sort of happy ballad songs, to the atmospheric stuff, real melancholic, oceanic sort of playing. It just gave it an extra dimension, having her on the violin.She provided a bit of flavour, whereas before, it was just like a three-piece rock band,” says Mark.

Recording in a Northland shed surrounded by nothing but sheep, helped imbibe the album with a degree of sparseness and grittiness.

“We were recording in between a half finished trailer sailor and other gear of Jackson’s sprawled around, PAs that have been pulled to bits and not quite put back together,” Leroy recalls. “I think in terms of impacting the sound, there’s an honesty to it. It doesn’t sound like it’s been too ‘studioised’.”

Actually, there’s a frosty feel to the album, which Mark puts down to the surroundings too.

“We recorded in the middle of winter last year, with this southwest slug rain bomb coming through. Because it was a tin roof, we couldn’t record when the rain was coming, so we’d just have a cup of tea, trying to keep our hands warm so that we could play the guitar when the time came, and the whole thing sort of lent itself to the sound of the album. Even the shape of the shed – it’s a big space, so it wasn’t a warm place to record in any sense of the word. And it’s not the warmest sounding record ever, you know? There is some coldness in it.”

Although much of the album features lively instrumentation and has an upbeat honky-tonk vibe, the lyrics are sombre in contrast, with a good measure of nihilism and themes of contempt and disillusionment cropping up throughout.

“Disillusionment is kind of what we were going through at the time.” says Leroy. “It’s kind of easy to write stuff when you’re going through hell… I think often our lives go well for the first 30 years, and then they start to change. When you’ve got faith in something, there’s a bitterness when things don’t work out as you expected, or where you trusted something, and it was in folly.

“When you write songs, you sometimes don’t know exactly what they were about until you finish them. I think there’s things that remain in your mind, and it’s a way of addressing them or kind of dealing with them.”

The album features a couple of covers, too. Mark reminisces on how the band got to covering Townes Van Zandt’s Waitin’ Around To Die.

“Leroy brought that in and it started off as he played it in between other songs as a bit of a joke. And, we just started playing it one day and got the arrangement for it and liked it.

“I think it has a darkness that’s easy to inhabit,” takes up Leroy. “That’s sort of like a Townes Van Zandt thing, not all his songs are sad – his songs are about life and life’s sad. I think in terms of putting our spin on it… it’s angrier, isn’t it?”

“Our strength is twisting covers into angry versions,” laughs Mark in agreement. “We do it with Solitary Man [Neil Diamond] as well. It’s a very sweet, sort of pop version, and we almost desecrate it with anger.”

Now that their debut album is finished, The Advocators are looking forward to giving it the attention it deserves and playing some shows, though they’ve already got the next album in their view.

“I think I’d like it to be more vulnerable, maybe,” suggests Leroy “A bit more stripped back if possible.”

“I was gonna say the opposite. I was gonna say more lush,” smiles Mark. “We’ll have to fight that one out.”